Symbol timing offset estimation scheme for OFDM systems based on power difference measurements

This paper presents a new blind symbol timing offset (STO) estimation scheme for wireless orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with constant modulus constellation. In the proposed scheme, the STO estimation is performed by minimizing the power difference between either adjacent or consecutive subcarriers, which basically depends on the assumptions made on the channel conditions. Monte Carlo simulation is used to assess the two realizations of the proposed system. The system performance is evaluated by means of mean squared error (MSE) over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and frequency selective mobile radio channels. The simulation results demonstrate that the MSE of the proposed system is well below the MSE of other well-established estimators reported in the literature.